Alisa Barcan

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A big audience is not the goal

Hi


I keep seeing lots of videos and training programmes on how to build a large audience. Titles such as "How I grew my Instagram to a gazillion followers in a month" and "How to get a ridiculous number of new YouTube subscribers" keep showing up in my feed and I wonder if anyone falls for it.


Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that a large audience is a bad thing or not something you should aim for. But what matters the most is not the number of subscribers or followers, but how engaged they are.


You can buy IG followers, YouTube subscribers and do "follow for follow" or other dodgy techniques to grow your audience. But if nobody is interested in what you have to say, you're wasting your time. It's just a vanity metric and nothing more.


Kevin Kelly famously argued that you only need 1,000 true fans to build a successful business. Depending on your goals and business model, you might not even need that many.


So keep doing your thing, build a community step by step and don't worry about the numbers so much. Quality over quantity.


Until next time, stay savvy.

Alisa

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